Interesting news on the street: the first is that our neighbour Jessica who lives on the other side of our semi-detached, has sold her place! Bad news here is she seemed to be in a hurry to get out -- maybe the Smith chaos just drove her away -- and she sold it without an Open House and appeared to take the first offer. She must be one of the few people to sell a house for less than asking in Toronto.
So what does that mean for us? Well, on one hand it's easy to say our house is worth more. Her place has an oil furnace, radiator heat, no A/C, an unfinished basement and very old kitchens and bathrooms. So you could make the case that if you wanted to get it to the level of our place it would cost you 100 grand. On the other hand, from a psychological point of view, you've got to figure that people would balk at paying a huge price differential for a house that from the outside doesn't look much different.
Who knows? All I can say is that suddenly the crazy irrational Toronto housing market just doesn't seem crazy and irrational enough. Bring on the rich desperate homebuyers!
Here's me, writing these Porktrasher songs and trying to be inventive with chord structures and all that when all along there are only four I need to know to write the hit that will pay for our house renos. So. Much. Time. Wasted.
My brother-in-law Scott is a successful architect in Seattle. He's won all sorts of AIA awards, spoken at conferences about design and sustainability, and was recently made a partner in his firm. He's also just a wonderful guy. So yeah, he's made it by most standards.
But when you've really made it is when your work is satirized, and some of his work was recently featured in my favourite site about modern architecture.
Oh sure, it's not quite as big as Tim Gill's new place, but I'm pretty thrilled that we've bought a new house!
Carol and I have talked for quite awhile about trying to find a larger, more modern house to give us some more room as the kids get older. The idea was we'd find one of those boxy triplexes or something fairly neutral (ie no more Edwardian rowhouses) in a less trendy neighbourhood (Little Italy is "hot") and use the price differential to pay for a reno that would open it up into a modern dream home.
Heh. Not so easy, as it turns out.
The gap between a reno'd house in Little Italy and a dump near the Galleria Mall is not as big as we'd hoped and early viewings were pretty depressing. However, on Friday we went to see a house not far from where we live now and it was very well maintained and giant -- without the usual giant price. We saw it at 10 am, made the offer at 11 and were signing papers by 4. Very exciting!
If you look from Google satellite (the red roof is ours, although stalkers note that Google conveniently shows the wrong address) it also has a nice big backyard -- huge ice rink next year!
Interestingly, a lot of houses on our current street have gone up for sale -- including the other half of our semi-detached - so it'll be interesting to see what they all go for.
Then all we have to do is fix up our current place, empty it of all the crap, sell it for buckets of money, then just use the buckets of money to fix up our new place.
This latest Nike piece with Tiger Woods is is the most red-hot viral video I've seen in quite awhile, and not surprisingly. So first, here it is:
Whew. That's it. I have no great pronouncements to make on the content or concept behind it other than it's pretty freaking good.
What I'm really interested in is what it takes bring a spot like this to air (is that what it's called online, or is it space?). It's much more that coming up with the idea itself: Although it's obviously very good, the relationship between mentor/father and superstar/son is a well-established trope in our sports (Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky come to mind immediately), and certainly with Nike. And the idea of betraying the values of said idolized father is incredibly powerful -- it's a story that's been told since Biblical times.
So okay, it's a great concept. But I think equally importantly, the ability for this piece like this to be conceived and executed you must have:
A creative team who knows Tiger as well or better than he knows himself. My first thought was "How did they even know that recording existed? Where did it come from?" I suspect there's a huge library of this type of content at Nike, and the team knows every kilobite of it. Knowledge is the source of insight, and they have it in spades.
High level connections and trust between agency and client. Obviously Wieden & Kennedy and Nike are joined at the hip, but I'm guessing this is the kind of concept that doesn't get pitched by mid-level creative teams to mid-level marketing people. This is the kind of concept where Dan Wieden calls the Mike Parker and says "Listen, we want to do something big here." Or maybe not. But it's most certainly a product of trust and not tricks.
High level connection and trust between Nike and Woods: Can you imagine going to Tiger and his representatives and saying, "Okay, so we're going to create a piece where Tiger's dead father is speaking from the grave and what he's saying directly calls out Tiger's recent behaviour. Tiger does nothing but listen to the voice. Oh, and we're going to release on the first day of Augusta"?
I can't. But they can, and did.
And that's why the world is watching Tiger Woods and thinking about Nike at the same time.
I don't know why I love these old objects. Is it because I only work with virtual objects that I love the tangible, tactile look of these? Or just the complexity and texture in the designs? The sense of weight? That I can't figure out how half of these would even work?
All of the above.
